Queering our keyboard workshop

workshop overview

Queering our Keyboard is a workshop about digital language use, and breaking with normality. We will take the time to consider how it is possible for us to use language on digital devices. Something most of us usually tend to take for granted, to the point we can consider it as something invisible, but is actually very much directed by colonial structures that influence how we see some languages as 'real' and others as 'fake' or 'underdeveloped'. We will do a queer intervention, to be able to examine those systems and to cheat them a little bit.

___

During this workshop, we will make our own 'letters' and make them typeable on our computers. It's divided in two parts:

pt. 1 : collectively creating an 'alphabet', by cutting 'letter' shapes out of erasers.

pt. 2 : we will investigate some of the underlying systems that make it possible to represent language digitally, so we can see what the necessary ingredients are to digitize our own 'letters'. And see why those systems imply Latin as the standard.

In the workshop, I use imitation as a Queering act. Not just to copy a process, but to re-think given meanings. First, by imitating the process of systematization of languages, in order to make it tangible. And, second, by proposing a hack, to cheat those systems a little bit, so we can actually use our 'letters' to type with.

workshop website

https://hub.xpub.nl/sergio/SI29/Queering%20our%20Keyboard/

I used the website primarily as a presentation during the workshop. But it has (had) different purposes.

Throughout making the concept, it has also become a way to organize my thoughts, collect sources, try out different structures.

I used many Iframes, to directly show other sources, interact with the websites.

I added a terms list and a schema for participants to orient themselves a bit. For the font-making part, I made a little tutorial-like thingy there including all the necessary download links for making a font out of the letter stamps. The 'having fun' part was initially supposed to allow participants to interact with the font, making a collective poem directly on the website, but this turned out to be too big of a technical challenge, so Michael helped me do this in a pad instead. We added a browser plug-in to my firefox, so the pad would get the fontfile form Sergio, which means the font won't show on the pad on other people's laptops. But, we could collectively type and display the font in the poem on at least one screen. And I was supposed to add a download link with the fontfile during the workshop, so it would appear as it got uploaded to sergio.

I also wanted to add a feedback field, but I decided to move that to the pad as well, and it wasn't used during the workshop in the end, people just told me their feedback afterwards..

Though the website could also become either something of a visual essay of the research, or an archive of the created fonts, if I will do more in the future.

documentation

setting and general vibe

collective poem on pad

outcome

We were 6 participants for my workshop in the end. Sharing the invite in group chats did not do much... Everyone that was there came after a personal invite or because I told them about it and they wanted to join. Three from them were not XPUB, and only two did not study graphic design. They were an old colleague of mine and a fine-art student I met at Roodkapje and then ran into in school. One of them actually knew a bit about coding and stuff. It was clear to me that this is not a workshop that is very accessible for people who do not have any prior knowledge with coding / typography at all. And it is also not a topic that is particularly interesting for them.

We started with a little gossip round, that turned into a bit of a discussion in the end. And I decided to just let that go for a bit. I was happy to see people actually engaged with the topic! I asked if everyone could share a weird or funny experience they had while trying to type. Everyone shared an experience about having to switch between languages. At some point everyone started showing their keyboards to each-other, which was about the best intro to the workshop that could have happened. And great for me to hear some of the differences in challenges that come out of typing in other languages / scripts.

Then, I introduced my motivation a bit, how I learned about the strong influence of latin in creating the system of character encoding, and then introduced imitation as queering method, to be able to show how character encoding works through making 'letter' stamps first, and after, to do an intervention in those systems we learned about.

Making the letter stamps was a super good way to start. Everyone enjoyed it and didn't wanna stop during the whole workshop. I did give a prompt to have something to start from, but actually, everyone just started making shapes. I think it really helped to introduce imitation as a way to re-think meanings. And to say that we don't have to think about letters as something that looks like a letter, but for the purpose of the workshop a 'letter' can mean anything we carve in that eraser. The prompt was not really used.

When we had some stamps finished we tried stamping them, and it didn't take long before we stamped each-others arms. Kiki, my designated photographer of the day, also joined the stamp-making, handed me her camera at some point and said 'you do that, I wanna go on with this.' lol.

I started my speech while everyone went on making stamps at the same time, already quite a bit over time, since we took extra time to share experiences. But making the stamps helped a lot to then make the bridge to talk about the letterpress, then using the stamps as a visual translation of what character encoding actually is, as a system. It was also great to see that people joined in while I was explaining to give input themselves. Feline, Hilal and Kiki all did this to go more in-depth on some idea I just introduced. ( And I was very happy in general that the story was engaging enough that people listened to it attentively and wanted to engage, since one of my concerns was that it was gonna be too dense or too complicated to follow hehe.. )

By the time we got to unicode, things got a bit foggy.. It was a challenge to try to explain what unicode is. So we drifted off a bit to another point, which I didn't expect, but was really interesting: we started discussing where the actual files are located. And for the binary codes, it was clear that that is shared from one device to another, for font-files, it started to click for us, (myself included) that because every font is referenced through the file, it exists on every device, it does not get that information from somewhere else through the internet cause that would mean that the font would break the moment you're disconnected. So, then gave the example of windows coming with a computer out of the box, is not one coherent whole at all, but every device has an exact copy of windows that give it the semblance that it is the same thing. It came at a different point then I intended but that was the main take-away I wanted to give in this workshop.

And it came at the right time, because by the time I was done talking it was already the end of the workshop time, and we would have still had to start making the font, by downloading Fontforge, having everyone draw their letters in vectors, replace them with the standard latin characters in a fontfile that I had prepared, and then combine those files on my laptop, export it and upload it to sergio, to make the whole poem with.

So we ended up doing a sped-up version of this, on my laptop, with kiki and youjung's help we quickly image traced the letters, they sent the svg files to me and I copy-pasted those in fontforge myself. It was on a screen, so others could see. But in the mean time, they had actually started a discussion about what we just did, what I showed. And I was like, well, this might actually be better than doing the exercise, especially since the 'aha' moment already happened. But I uploaded a quick version of the font, with 6 replaced characters to sergio, it popped up on the website and on the pad, and we typed a little bit with it. We didn't do much of a poem in the end. But, when the font changed there were some 'woooww' s in the room. :))

'letter' stamps created by participants

The font we made during the workshop: QoKCollectivefont.woff2

Our characters are placed over standard latin lowercase codepoints

letter stamps

I ended up using these letter stamps alongside the website to be able to visualize what character encoding is. It helped a lot to translate those abstract systems to something tangible, and to connect it to the letter carving exercise.

On the website, I added this diagram to separate some of the ideas I wanted to discuss, after Doriane's suggestion to create an overview that participants can use to orient themselves in the story :)).

Schema

             ---------
           /        /
         /        / 
       /        /
     /        /   
    ----------
 mark        ---------
           /        / |    system
         /        / 1 | 
       /        /  0 /
     /        /  0 /     
    ---------- 1 /     code
    | U+0041 | /
    ----------
    
    standard
    

And then, I prepared some eraser stamps to tell the story with.

So during the talk, I related back to those four different categories: mark, system, code, standard. To be able to say, 'we're now here'. I started by introducing the letterpress as systematized way of reproducing written language. Showing that it was build around the logic of Latin as separate 'blocks', with every block representing one letter. And then used Arabic as an example of why those 'blocks' don't make sense for using non-latin scripts. And that system forces that other script to 'act like' its latin (imitate it), so to work in it's logic in order to be representable in the first place.

Then, I went through character encoding. That every letter / character gets a binary code assigned to it, in order to be understood by computer systems. So I wrote the binary code on the side of the erasers and then showed the erasers from top view, to say 'we see this', then from the side to say 'the computer sees this'. So the computer doesn't actually have an idea of what a letter is or what it means or how it should look.

Then, Unicode joined the game. That all countries started making their own encoding systems, that are incompatible, they can't communicate between each-other, so eventually we decided on an international convention. I explained Unicode as a library. A system of categorization to be able to make and maintain an inventory. But instead of books, it's for letters. The binary code would be the equivalent of the IBAN code for books. ( this part I came up with last-minute, but helped a lot for people to understand unicode. Still, it was hard to really explain the difference between the two code systems ).

After that, came the difference between the encoding system and the fontfile. Which was also a tough one. I made these little cards and drew the letters in dotted lines to try to visualize the difference between the codes representing the 'idea' of the letter, vs. the fontfile holding the actual drawing of the letter. Which remains kind of an abstract idea, but also the place with the biggest friction maybe. Here, I used the Arabic erasers again to show where the tension is today for language representation. That the encoding system itself cannot actually render any non-latin script propperly, unless it happens to work in these little blocks as well. For any other script, the correct rendering happens in the fontfile, where all the rules for showing the letters properly are added as code rules. Meaning that the system itself is not actually capable of representing languages equally or universally, we are only getting better at making it look like it can do that. ( that's the system 'pretending' or 'acting as if' ).

And then, the last step was to show what ByeByeBinary did to cheat that system and to make representing post-binary language possible. Basically, in all those layers in the schema, imitating how that system was intended to be used, but using it, so that it allows to a certain extend to use it in their own way. To get around having to propose to unicode to have post-binary characters added to the standard. ( which they won't do obviously ). So the last step was the Private Use Area, and showing how byebyebinary made the private public. Playing their own librarian in a way.

Then, I proposed that for the purpose of the workshop, we could do a simplified version of that, only in the 'mark' layer, to do a similar thing. By opening a latin-based fontfile and switching the latin characters for our own. Imitating latin back to represent our own 'letters'. :))

letter stamps used to explain character encoding process

latin vs. arabic encoding

character rendering happens in fontfile, is not encoded

encoding unicode latin

binary codes, how the computer reads

switching fontfiles, binary code only represents the 'idea' of a specific letter, not how to show it.

unicode = a library, a convention to organize

unicode private use area + fontfile, BBB hack

unicode latin vs. unicode private use area

lil reflection

Overall, the workshop went super well! I tried a lot to reduce the amount of information going into this, and it was still very dense. But everyone that came was super engaged with the story. They joined in to add their own experiences, at points where concepts were not really clear they asked questions (mostly with unicode) which was a bit of a challenge, but I was super happy to see that they really tried to understand. And there were two moments, after the gossip round and while I made the fontfile, that a discussion naturally started about the topic. That was honestly even better than I had hoped for.

There was a little 'aha' moment when we realized that if we change a fontfile in one place, it doesn't necessarily do that everywhere. And I thought that might just be too confusing, (maybe it was a bit). But explaining it with Windows OS, helped to illustrate that those software appear to us as if they're one consistent whole, but are actually all individual copies of the same thing. So that helped me to see that the exercise of changing that fontfile just between us actually does make a change in how we think of those systems.

The 'letter' stamp making worked super well. As a fun activity to do, to connect to the story better, and to keep those neurodivergent brains occupied while listening to a long talk. Because of time, I did not make a moment to ask everyone to combine their 'letters' on one page, to really make it a collective thing. And it would have been nice to take the time to have them share what the shapes they made meant to them.

Overall, it could make the stamp exercise more meaningful to have a good prompt that connects all the 'letters'. It's a fine balance between still finding meaning in the shape, but staying away from making the exercise about making a new system of meaning. But it could help to have a more personal takeaway from the workshop and to make the poem a more meaningful conclusion of the day.

For the Unicode part, I could find a way to really visualize the library using the erasers. To show why its different form the binary codes. ( and it is definitely fine to stick with this and not go into utf-8 vs. 16 and ASCII and stuff. But it could also help here to do a bit more research myself, to be able to explain better how that information moves, where they live as files and where not, and which are exchanged over the internet, and when and how.

On a technical level, the set-up with the website as presentation on a bigger screen worked super well. And the diagram helped to connect the presentation to the exercise. I would have loved to make the website a more interactive part of the workshop. Because we ran out of time, we didn't manage to go through the fontforge steps, but I also realized it would not really have worked if we tried. There was an issue with downloading fontforge on Mac. The stamps everyone made were too complex to retrace in vectors quickly, so we decided to image trace a few just to show the idea. But if we would have done it, it would have taken a very long time to do. I thought I would let everyone replace a few letters each in a separate fontfile, and I would merge the files into one at the end. But that would have been really complicated to organize. I either have to make that step way simpler and do it myself on one computer, or I somehow leave it out even.

I thought that going to digital or making the poem would be the 'aha' moment. But that came during the talk already. So I also felt that after that, making the font was just for the sake of doing it. So maybe it can be left out somehow.

I was super happy people would interrupt my talk to add their own experiences as well, and I would love to somehow be more intentional about that. Because for now, I let people talk and then went back to my story because I felt we were already behind. But they were also the most important parts because there everyone made the story their own. So maybe there could be more focus on this instead of making the font.

But in the end it was clear that this was a workshop for people who are already interested in type / coding / language, and have some per-knowledge of it. The terminologies were not the problem, but to stay engaged with the topic and to connect the dots between certain concepts did require this a little bit. And, it was also very clear that we still had too little time to do everything. It is just too much information to fit in 3 hours, even if it's made more accessible. It might be more of a full-day workshop, or one that's split in two parts.

the workshop announcement I sent out :)

how to continue

-> Flask app to exchange the poem pad for an html form on the workshop website! Flask

process

first draft

The workshop will investigate how your computer knows which character to display when you press one of the keys on your keyboard. By making our own letters and making a keyboard out of them, we will encounter some of the technologies, standards and protocols involved in this process, and we will touch on some of the politics surrounding them. Our self-made keyboard will show why this part of our computer, phone, or other device, is maybe less self-evident and fixed then we might realize.

Planning:

- Open the day with a quick round of introduction. And a small discussion on how we think our computer interprets language when we type.

- give an overview of what we'll do that day and an introduction into the topic. why closer examining our keyboard is a queering act.

- making our own 'script' / 'language' by cutting out shapes from erasers. This is to mimic the process of creating type casts. An intuitive introduction to the process of industrial typesetting of the latin script. From there we can make the connection to how that process formed the basis of digital language. The 'script' we're making doesn't have to resemble anything like a working / existing language. It might actually hit the point home even more that to the computer, it does not matter if the shapes we make are meaningful or interpretable as readable language.

Depending on how many we are, everyone can create 1 or 2 'letters' that we can bring together to make a collective 'script'. And we can use the erasers as stamps to show the basic logic of latin-based industrial typesetting.

- we can digitize the font by scanning it as jpeg, either put it in fontforge directly or use another program to make vector shapes out of them.

- lunch! break for some food, (for me it would be interesting to see if discussions around the topic form naturally)

- short overview of what we did so far and how we will continue the afternoon.

- make our letters into a typeface using font forge. I'll find a protocol to share all vectorised letters between everyone. everyone makes their own version of the font file in fontforge. There's a few ways to go about this part that depend a bit on what is possible on the technical side. So this might change a bit, but these are some options:

1. we stick to the latin character set. In the place of the unicode codepoints for latin, we put the letterforms of our own script.

We generate the font into a .otf file. In keyboard software (important note on this at the bottom), we add the font to the existing Latin keyboard and export the keyboard.

-> this should be the most straight-forward way to do this. The encoding is done in the fontfile rather than the keyboard itself. But it should be able to type with the font we assigned to it.

2. we use Unicode's Private Use Area code-points.

In font forge, we add PUA code-points to the fontfile, and place our characters on those. in the .otf file, you'll be able to write in both latin characters and our made up script. In the keyboard software, instead of replacing the latin charaters, we assign PUA code-points to the keyboard keys. We add our font to the keyboard software, and add the PUA code-points to keys when Alt is pressed. Then, add our font, and tell it to interpret the empty PUA values with the characters we assigned to them in the font file.

-> haven't managed to make this work so far, even though documentation says this should be the way to do it. It would mean that typing with the keyboard in latin would show latin characters that can be interpreted by the computer as such, writing in our script would show the characters when typing while ALT is pressed, but the computer will only recognize the empty unicode values.

--> Probably need to assign the right language to the keyboard. The language that contains the unicode values of the PUA?

3. we do the same, but instead of PUA code-points, we use the standard latin capital letter code-points. The keyboard would be able to write in latin lowercase and our script show our characters while shift is pressed, and the computer will interpret it as capital letters.

In any of these cases, throughout the process we will have to deal with the unicode standard, the ISO standard for language names, the .otf file format, how the logic of industrial typesetting ( the erasers ) translates digitally, and why that means that Latin will necessarily always be the default script system that other writing systems or practices must adapt to in order to work digitally, and what organizations are in charge of regulating this through these standards.

I'm hoping that this visualizes at least that how we use language digitally is not a given and that the politics surrounding it are quite significant. There is actually a thin line between fiction and reality when it comes to language, and these systems at the intersection between technology, politics and aesthetics decide for a big part how we come to imagine some use of language as fact, formal, fixed and others as made-up, backward, or fake.

- the last step would be to create a collective poem using the keyboard with our made-up script. This will probably be a bit improvised, since it will depend on how far we all get with creating the keyboard. Also need to make a protocol for this.

- and then we end the day. If people like to stick around we have some drinks, have a bit of an after discussion if there's some energy left, or we play some Wii.

Timeline wise, this will probably take a full day. I'll work the schedule out it detail when I figure out the technical parts.

Setting:

We can sit around the big table in my studio. Extension chord in the middle of the table. Coffee machine and fridge close by! I'll bring erasers and stanley knives for the first part of the day. For the second part, participants will bring their own laptop.

I need to figure out the wifi, since we all use mobile data in the studio. Either people will have to use their own, or I'll give my hotspot.

Date:

21 / 22 march

equipment:

- extension chord

- scanner

- wifi / hotspot

- laptops (everyone brings)

- monitor / board to sketch

- water

- lunch

- drinks

crowd:

- How many ppl can I host? -> thinking 8/10 ppl max.

- How many ppl will be familiar with typography terminology / have experience working with code / terminal?

- studio mates

- friend groups

- if group size allows it, whatsapp / signal groups. Dear Fem Rotterdam (queer / fem resource sharing chat), Snackbar Frieda chat (squat / anarchist community chat).

Communication:

- make lil' announcement banner. title, time, date, location, small description, what to bring (laptop, OS, (own data?))

Documentation:

1. A collective poem, typed with the custum keyboard & script. If it will be possible to communicate across devices, we use a collaborative software that can recognise the font to write the poem together.

2. all the sketches, references, etc. I use, or others bring up, that help understand how the custom keyboard works.

NOTE ON SOFTWARE:

There's a few options for custom keyboard software:

The most widely used free / open source option, with widest OS support is Keyman. Which is significant since this software is created by SIL Language Technologies. (More of my research on this organization so far on my user page). The short version, it boils down to this organization is continuing the colonial project at present, at the far margins of digitally represented languages. I'm debating whether or not to go in-depth on this organization, and how I feel about using this software in the workshop, and if I do, how to do it.

They also maintain the ISO standard for language names. They do regular applications to Unicode for adding 'undocumented' languages to the standard, developed the Open Font License, and made a bunch of other tools for digital language representation.

I've done some first tests for the workshop in this software so far. I think it's important to show, but need to research more on other options.

So there's the ethical point of using this on the one side.

The practical point on the other. A lot of other programs are restricted to a particular OS, are paid, etc. If I ask everyone to bring a laptop, how will I manage this? To be figured out..

Manetta's feedback:

- stay on 1 device to keep it smaller

- use python (can I do that?)

- emphasize the queering part: character encoding as character miming, who to mime back?

- give examples: ByeByeBinary

- it can be way smaller exercises, it can be something small

and my thoughts:

- can I use a python script to do the same / a similar thing as what I am trying with Keyman?

    > it would be the most DIY way to edit keyboard keys, and would get around the need to use Keyman.

    > through the command line. How intuitive would this be for people that are not familiar with the command line at all?

    > why the keyboard? to focus on a digital interface that for most people feels intuitive / self evident / fixed. to examine why it is not. compared to that, the command line is not an intuitive interface to many people.

- what's the queering part? Needs to be more explicit. Maybe the main focus of the workshop. The exercise should be what illustrates that point.

    > a more direct reference to Butler. Computers always work in the logic of the Latin, no matter what language / script a computer is set in, a keyboard is set in, or language is written. Multi-script character encoding is saying to a non-latin letter: take the place of the 'a', act as if you're an 'a', and work within Latin logic. From there we add extra code to make you behave like your proper script does. Arabic as an example: The Alif will take the place of the A, and placed in the tiny block that is A, but Arabic letters change form depending on their position in a word, and is written right-to-left. Extra rules need to be added to create that behavior. But even when presented with an Arabic text, the computer doesn't see connected letter forms, it still sees separate blocks. Each letter one block, one string of 0's and 1's. And it might display the content for the user from right-to-left, but it still reads the information from left-to-right.

Every technological development in digital language representation is some form of adding rules to a writing system that can't be properly represented by default. But the rhetoric around it, is that developments makes language representation more equal. That is something to question. It's at the intersection of technology, aesthetics and politics. It creates a double reality, like when Butler starts their essay on Gender insubordination by saying 'How come I can both be a lesbian and have to act like one at the same time?' Since Latin was imagined as the 'default', the 'original' writing system for computers, every other writing system, visually represented writing practice becomes a 'cheap copy'. The promise of true representation, true equality is a falsehood because of this. It's not possible. But since it's the only option, there is no way around it, it still matters to try.

Marloes' feedback:

- define scope, narrow it down

- situated approach, keep it close to yourself

- show examples that illustrate your story

- keep participants in mind: how much can they digest in a day? Make space for their input! Let them explore the material themselves as well.

!!! Ask for feedback at the end! could also be useful input if I decide to continue this research. How did they experience the day? Did their perception change? Maybe in ways I did not expect? How can I ask for this in a fun way?

- for preparing, prioritizing: Go through the whole day step-by-step.

Second draft

day schedule: sat, 21 march (edit: I fucked up the dates.. It'll be on the 28th)

open door / intro	intoduction round + small discussion: How is language represented on your computer? ( graphic designers can't respond first )	30 min	12:00
letter stamps: collectively making an imaginary script	- use erasers to carve 'letter shapes'. everyone can do a few, we throw them together, we have a 'script' to work with for the day. - show lead letter type casts > from industrial typesetting to computer systems - making some words with stamps	30 min
digitizing our letters: scanning & vectorizing in fontforge	- scanning the letters ( how to distribute them among everyone? ) - downloading fontforge - vectorizing scans in fontforge ( in small groups? ) - what is Unicode?	1 hr
snack break		30 min	14:00
making a keyboard lay-out	- using unicode code points for vectorized letters (fontforge) - export + install font-file - download Keyman Developer + Keyman Compiler > ! why Keyman? what is it, who is SIL? why do we use this specific software? ! - make a new keyboard project > why computers can only interpret Latin logic. Arabic type example ( Lara Captan ), queer type example ( ByeByeBinary ) - replace keys with Unicode code points, add font to keyboard project, compile keyboard ( extra time to fix errors ) - export + install keyboard ( time to fix errors )	2 hrs > too long, how to save time?
try using the script	- use the script in notes app / terminal / browser / making a collective poem?	30 min	17:00
end the day	- ask people for feedback! - if there's energy left, a small recap of the day / discussion - or have a drink! and play wii	15 min - whenever
		5 hrs

lol.. feedback from friend: 5 hrs is really long. > simplify steps, work in smaller groups. keep explanations short...

keyboard lay-out step on one device?

or skip stamp-making. :,( sketch on paper, make vectors directly in fontforge

have ppl download fontforge while I scan stamps. I distribute letters, have ppl work in pairs of 2.

should we work with the same font-file in the end? can it be combined sooner?

alternative scedule: leave out keyman (think this will be the way to go)

introduction	intro round + overview of the workshop	15 min	12:00
making letter stamps	carving letters from erasers + show letterpress type casts scanning letters	45 min
digitizing letters with fontforge	download fontforge trace letters to vector image what is unicode? use capital latin code points for our letters export font	1hr
installing the font	installing the font change font of notes app / install on workshop website / etc.	30 min	14:00
having fun!	suggestion: make a collective poem on workshop website or freestyle something	30min
end the day	ask for feedback end the day with drink	15min	15:00
		3 hrs

no keyman means less focus on SIL. But still talking about unicode / web standards. It will be less of me showing things, more of trying to get a conversation going.

The takeaway should really just be to consider the digital use of language as not normal / neutral. It's not so much about understanding on a technical level how this process goes.

The only downside of this is that without keyboard software with a graphical user interface it might be a less intuitive step for a participant going into this without any prior knowledge, to see the physical key on the keyboard and manually changing the character assigned to that key.

Doriane's feedback

Hello here, first thing first: I LOVE EVERYTHING YOU DID. you have precise research skills, and this is very good. i think it's really nice how you show your understanding of the many frictions appearing from the making of letters to their encoding

> these systems at the intersection between technology, politics and aesthetics decide for a big part how we come to imagine some use of language as fact, formal, fixed and others as made-up, backward, or fake.

beautiful sentence. but making a deep research compatible with a workshop will be a challenge for you. right now you could write a whole essays about your research, but the participant of a workshop like to have agency, to have fresh space to explore by themselves, you shouldn't be there to just give them answer but more to replicate what triggered your interest and give it to them. like it's totally ok if you don't go into the SIL/keyman rabbit hole, but something kept your interest there, instead of giving them your research, how can you give them the same interest: is it by doing something, through a social protocol, through a drawing or a visual reference, through a little story or gossip that exemplify some frictions?

about the first part - making letters

LOVE THE HANDMADE CRAFT PART! I also love that you'll merge the letter of everyone, as "a collective portrait": if you would do it again you'll end up with different letters, different poem, different story, this is really valuable. you need to curate that part well and trigger their interest and joy and concern. In your case you could really use some icebreaker gossip rounds. think like "whats your favorite emoji?" or "what's your keyboard layout (do you use an external one? what about it's physicality) and how did you learned to type" and you do a round of everyone. This help the participants already feel invested in your research, and everyone will be already more inspired to make letter together after hearing people's stories.

I like your asemic writing proposition (but good that you reference it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing) how do people come up with symbols, or what makes a symbol a glyph (a letter-like thing) is complicated. It's also hard to come up with new letters (i'm serious) like to not "culturally appropriate" other type of shape within our unconscious bias: like to not end up with CJK (chinese, japanese korean) or Arabic, or Cyrillic, etc. bring references of asemic writing! even if they are just on a table on the side.

• https://martinlemaire.fr
• https://plain-form.com/typefaces/michaux look at the reference images there, and the process: how we recognize letters in things that aren't
• also (couldn't find the one i was looking for) but those kind of images collection: https://www.instagram.com/faces2day/, but this is a psycological phenomenon where our "monkey brain" learn to detect faces as a survival mechanism, hence we keep seeing them. i see a relation between that sort of things and assemic writing
• also i'm a true lover of irmablanks work: https://mai36.com/artists/irma-blank
• show BBB ligatures (literally making new letters but with meaning) https://typotheque.genderfluid.space

personally i wouldn't go into unicode and all of that during that exercise of letter making, i think it's good to free the expression in a first moment to then confront the group to the difficulty of standardized technology.

about the second part - encoding

if i get it correctly, what you wanna do with Keyman is a binding of the keys with specific unicode point? (so when you type "a" it actually write a unicode point of the PUA?

I think it's good to tell a story (small lecture moment?) unfolding: from when you press a key to the rendering of a character (maybe this could be a little story of someone pressing a key and seeing with drawing or references what happen at each step, kind of zooming in a little moment in time), because all the steps deserve their own little story and it's interesting to see them together.

• what's unicode? (do you feel confident in explaining?) -- the standard level, like it's not even a file it's just a social convention we all agree on so when i sent you "a" you receive "a", it's "global" but we have PUA, also very political, also emojis (!)
• what's a font, and a font file? -- the drawing level, unicode is "formless" the fonts actually draw the shapes and fonts can lie (as in some of your proposals), but fonts are contextual! (only someone with the same fonts on their machine will see the same same thing, otherwise that layer fallback to another font - it's "device specific")
• what's a keyboard layout? -- the physical interface level, this relate to the keyboard manufacturer, however there is also a lot of keyboard modders that tweak or made their diy keyboards. why do we type in qwerty/azerty /... things like that?
• what's Keyman and key binding? -- the digital interface adapting to the physical interface level for non-latin languages lol

some refs on those:

• unicode stuffs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCoed5Oo_J4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U, also look at Unicode proposal documents
• the SIL evangelist rabbit hole is interesting :) i remember a talk by authentic.website where they said things about it but can't find it, https://www.instagram.com/p/C8M7MR5RNgS/ ?
• keyboard binding/digital interfaces, the thing about how phone keyboard tricks us and are an "invisible software" or auto-completion (a whole topic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAVV4kAYlI8
• open source keyboards stuff and modder community, like ergodox and stuff? like the physical hardware matter, are we pressing the letter A and it's writing something else, or am I doing a shortcut and stuff. or brendan doing a keyboard out of sticks.
• for font: the use of ligature in OTF, typical example is the QUNI by BBB https://typotheque.genderfluid.space/fr/quni (or the indigo font - cryptoligature)

for the practicality of the second part:

• be a good teacher in summarizing and telling the different part (mega important) (can be short) (but require synthetic resources or explanation prepared in advance)
• make the exercise the simpler the better: what is the minimal version of writing with your character on the computer (just make a font on 1 computer and sent it back to everyone). so you are sure you can do everything (even the poem!). then leave the room open for bonnus steps: keyman, but also how to use on your phone? how to distribute the font to let friends download it? can you change the default font of your computer so just write like that everywhere (this is very queer in my opinion), but important to precise fonts are what you see, not what other people see (not what you send). (also there is a magic feeling of suddenly seeing the character you draw in other people's websites - the ones that uses default fonts).

furthering your research

to go further in your research i suggest

• the 3 episode on the ARTE of the invention of the alphabet are MEGA WORTH WATCHING, it goes from the first writing, to the printing press and guttenberg and how in many other culture they were other tihngs, and then it goes to typing today with technology, it's in fucking french lol but im sure we can find a subtitled version https://boutique.arte.tv/detail/l_odyssee_de_l_ecriture?source=PLURIMEDIA
• totally other references that you might be interested in but it's the text of Paul Soulelis that's firstly titled "what is a queer typography" and then reads "there is no queer typography only acts of queer writing and reading" https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t20kjjo8favlu6azg9m9q/WIQT1.pdf?rlkey=i3m46wjbvyu5bvojmg6j2jmmb&e=1&dl=0

sources

unicode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCoed5Oo_J4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U

Use all unicode characters in python

Unicode in Python

SIL

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8M7MR5RNgS/

keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAVV4kAYlI8

type / history of writing

https://boutique.arte.tv/detail/l_odyssee_de_l_ecriture?source=PLURIMEDIA

ByeByeBinary QUNI tutorials

https://typotheque.genderfluid.space/

What is a Queer Typography

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t20kjjo8favlu6azg9m9q/WIQT1.pdf?rlkey=i3m46wjbvyu5bvojmg6j2jmmb&e=1&dl=0

Queering Damage

https://snelting.domainepublic.net/wp-content/uploads/QueeringDamage.pdf

Acting Ethically in an Imperfect world

http://raw.writings.hongminhee.org/2026/02/acting-materialistically-in-an-imperfect-world/

Varia command line workshop

https://vvvvvvaria.org/curriculum/In-the-Beginning-...-Was-the-Commandline/

Arabic Script base glyphs and character representation -> glyphs app forum

https://forum.glyphsapp.com/t/arabic-script-base-glyphs-and-character-representation/25213/3

Ama foundry Falak typeface project

https://www.amafoundry.com/stories/the-falak-aceotl-project-part-1

Hilal's bachelor's thesis

https://kabk.github.io/go-theses-23-hilal-mutluel/